Social interaction between groups of people who share a common interest is aptly captured by a “social network”. Popular social networks, for example Facebook and Orkut, connect people by using interdependencies such as friendship, kinship, school or college, hobbies, etc. It is generally believed and it is reasonable to assume that the value of a social network grows with the number of users.
A social network accessible by the use of a mobile-phone is referred to a mobile social network. Participants in the mobile social network are consumers of a telecommunication service provider, and hence the social interactions may include additional social information, such as call records and subscriber profile.
The idea driving the mobile social network application is that targeted or social information should be made available to the mobile users “on the fly”. Mobile social network services are broadly classified into two types: push and pull. In push type, the target information, such as points of interest (POI) in a geographical neighborhood of the user's current location is provided to the user by the application service-provider automatically. In contrast, in pull type the target information is requested by the user to the mobile social network service. Mobile social network services commonly include features such as (i) giving POI in a push type request by estimating user's current geographical location and (ii) giving a suggested list of friends in the neighborhood, in a pull type request.
Some mobile applications need to send information of interest to the mobile user, and also perhaps enquire about the user's preferences for certain information. People in the same social group tend to have similar preferences. Hence, applications would do well to use the mobile social network to determine user's preferences from the preferences of their peers in the social network. Further, the information itself may be clustered into “groups”, such that a user's preference for information in a particular group indicates likelihood for her preference for information in the cluster. Thus, the social network of users and the information clusters can be used in tandem to match relevant information to interested users.
Systems which suggest or have proposed to suggest POI to a mobile user near its location include AT&T, Whrrl, Buzzd, and Loopt. Among all these systems, Whrrl allows its users to rate POI in its cities. There are also services that focus on connecting socially related users. For example, Brightkite offers services to registered users to connect with their existing friends at other social networking websites and also to meet new people based on the geographical location. The above mentioned solutions depend on the mobile user having an internet access means on his Mobile Station (MS).